Clementine is an open source and cross-platform music playback application that supports a plethora of digital audio file formats and is heavily inspired by version 1.4 of the highly acclaimed Amarok audio player software. The application lets users to play tracks from their local music library, listen to Internet radio stations, create dynamic or smart playlists, playback Audio-CDs, playback songs uploaded to popular cloud hosting services, as well as to discover and fetch podcasts.

Features at a glance

Key features include tabbed playlists, support for importing and exporting M3U, PLS, ASX, and XSPF playlists, CUE sheet support, native desktop notifications, projectM visualisations, queue manager, lyrics, automatic download of biographies and photos of artists, and fetching of missing tags from the MusicBrainz service. With Clementine you can also transcode your music into MP3, FLAC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Speex digital audio file formats, edit tags of MP3 and Ogg files, or download missing album artwork from Amazon or Last.fm.

You can sync your portable player

Another interesting feature is the ability to effortlessly synchronize your portable audio player, such as iPod, iPhone, or any other device that uses the MTP or mass-storage technologies and connects through a USB port. In addition, you can remotely control the application using an Android device, a Wii remote, Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification (MPRIS), or the command-line of another Linux-based operating system.

Supports a wide range of music and cloud storage services

The built-in radio functionality supports a wide range of services, including Digitally Imported, Soundcloud, Spotify, Last.fm, Magnatune, Grooveshark, SomaFM, Subsonic, Jamendo, Icecast, SKY.fm, and JAZZRADIO.com. Search for audio files and playing them from a popular cloud storage service is also possible. It supports Dropbox, SkyDrive, Ubuntu One, Box, and Google Drive. Furthermore, the GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating system are supported at this time.

Bottom line

In conclusion, Clementine is a very modern and complex music playback software that can easily replace the default audio player application of your Linux distribution.

Clementine was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on September 20th, 2014